Began session by telling the students that for the first part of the morning I wanted to get some feedback from them about the project. I explained that this information would help us in the planning and organisation of future projects, and explained that I had a sheet of paper with five questions that I wanted them to answer.

I asked them if they would like me to play the recording of the schools music compositions (so far) whilst they were writing their answers. They thought this was a good idea. (The CD I have prepared features two compositions from each of the three schools). I explained to them that it wasn't the finished product, but that it might give them an idea of how the end result might sound. I also asked them to listen to the music and tell me afterwards if they thought that the compositions needed to be altered in any way.

I asked the students to each get themselves a desk and a pen (so they could do the job legibly). I was amazed at how efficiently they did this. Within minutes they had assembled themselves behind the desks in a straight line and were writing their responses on the paper, not only that but they were completely silent. It was at this point I realised how strange my way of working with them must be. The desk and orderly-straight-line thing was obviously something they were completely conditioned to. (It was like Pavlov's dogs!) (In fact, I was so surprised that I left the room to fetch Tim so that he could see this amazing phenomenon. Actually, he wasn't that impressed. He had seen them behind desks before!)

Afterwards we discussed the music that we had heard. The students enjoyed the music, especially the compositions from the other schools. For the 'Wrong Place' composition, which they had heard before, they turned out the lights to see if they jumped (and some did) when the loud note came towards the end.

After break I asked the students if there were any parts of the CD recording that they thought still needed working on. They said no. I then said that when recording the Hartsdown 'Tunnel' piece we had run into difficulties because there was a drum lesson going on in the adjacent room. I played them back the recording and sure enough you could hear the drumming in the background. I asked the students if they would do some work on the Tunnel piece. They agreed. I played the whole piece to them, and then the word collage part of the composition on its own, which was the section with the drumming in the background. I explained the piece to them and we listened to Hartsdown's word collage, writing down their words and then adding our own. From this we made our own word collages. We initially worked as one group but eventually Hannah had the idea of dividing everybody into two separate groups so that we could have two complementary word collages being performed simultaneously. We worked like this for a while and experimented with different suggestions. (Callum had the idea that the words "I'm gonna get you, get you, get you" in his word collage should be panned to go around the listeners' heads.)

When we were ready to get down to actually composing our word collage proper there was the suggestion that we split up into smaller groups and work on separate pieces. The students divided into four: Som worked on her own; the remaining four girls worked together; Kai and Matt worked together and the remaining four boys worked as one group. After about fifteen minutes the students had finished their pieces and they rehearsed them separately before performing them to each other, before lunch.

We then took a staggered lunch so that we could record all the different groups and make the best use of our lunchtime. Whilst recording Som, Tim was in the room. He actually stopped his form-filling-in as Som's performance was so impressive. She recorded it twice. and the second time it was even better.

After all the recordings and the end of lunch, it was clear that as far as the students were concerned they had finished their work for the day! So, instead, I sat and chatted with them for half an hour beginning with asking them if we did the project again how would they like it to be different. Hannah said she would have liked to use real instruments, such as her guitar instead of the emphasis on what she called "kindergarten instruments", i.e., hand percussion. I said that everyone had been invited to bring in their instruments at the beginning of the project and that I had repeated this invitation in subsequent sessions. Since only Ainsleigh had brought in something (her bagpipes) we had simply worked with whatever instruments the school had at hand for us to play, and even then they had been given free rein as to what they wanted to use. There was also a short discussion about whether we could have played some 'normal' music, like 'Atomic Kitten'; however, as there was a lack of agreement as to the preferred style of music or pop group, the students decided that our more exploratory musical approach had been perhaps more interesting, after all, it had also included some 'poppy' bits (for the car journey). Callum said that next time it would be good for the boys to be kept separate from the girls as whenever I asked the group for suggestions it was the girls who voiced their suggestions whilst the boys were still thinking about what they would say. For this reason, Callum felt that the project had been female led. (As it happens, I'm not sure if I agree with his assessment. If anybody had led the project it was generally whomever was concentrating on the task-in-hand at the time - male or female.) Anyway, I comforted Callum by informing him that in my opinion female dominance didn't stop with school but rather, it was something he'd probably have to get used to! These discussions led onto a general discussion about various values and the changing world, and from this (in the style of Ken Robinson's 'Out Of Our Minds') I tried to make the link with the necessity of being flexible and creative with our thinking. Finally, we finished off the afternoon with a musical 'game' involving the students working on short compositions using the piano, a microphone and the Kaoss pad.

After school I had a good chat with Tim about the project. In his opinion the project had been a success. He had seen the pupils grow, work more as a team and behave more maturely. He was especially impressed with Som. I said that for me the difficulty had been the discipline. Again, he contextualised the students' behaviour by saying that, by normal classroom standards, their behaviour had been good. We read through students' evaluations and discussed each student's response.